"Use Unicode" is not easy solution for CJK UTF-8 (UCS-2) is used in the software internal. UTF-8 is *not* used "outside" (documents/printing/displaying/...) We can't convert some characters irreversible: EUC-JP -> Unicode -> ShiftJIS -> Unicode -> EUC-JP It becomes some problems to use iconv: ex) samba CJK Unicode convertion tables are a bit different between each vendors.